Officials: Pre-9/11 Memo Excluded Data

WASHINGTON - Just one day after President Bush received a pre-Sept. 11 briefing on al-Qaida's effort to strike on U.S. soil, senior government executives received a similarly titled memo that excluded information about current threats and investigations, say federal officials who have read both documents.

The Aug. 7, 2001 memo, known as the senior executive intelligence brief or SEIB, didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al-Qaida activity that Bush had been told of a day earlier in a memo entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," the officials said Monday.

The senior executives' memo also did not mention a threat received in May 2001 of a U.S.-based explosives attacks or say that the FBI had concerns about recent casing of buildings in New York, the officials told The Associated Press.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because the senior executives' memo remains classified.

But administration officials said there was nothing sinister about the deletions because the memos are destined for two different audiences. The CIA historically uses different standards for the president's daily intelligence update and the one provided to senior policy-makers, officials said.

Typically, the senior executives' memo goes to scores of Cabinet-agency officials from the assistant secretary level up and doesn't include raw intelligence or sensitive information about ongoing law enforcement matters, officials said.

That is done to guard against unnecessary leaks and because that type of sensitive information isn't deemed essential to be distributed to all policy-makers, they said.

Terrorism policy-makers and those on the front lines get that information directly from targeted raw intelligence reports. For instance, CIA, FBI, Customs and immigration and White House anti-terror officials had received the May 2001 intelligence report about a possible al-Qaida explosives plot on U.S. soil shortly after it arrived and were investigating it by the time the president learned of it, the officials said.

The senior executives' memo "is not used as a way to transmit actionable (raw) intelligence," a senior administration official said. "Instead, policy-makers making counterterrorism policy receive their information about particular threats through a variety of other ways such as human source reports, signal (electronic) intelligence and law enforcement reports."

Nonetheless, some who saw the memo said they feared it gave policy-makers and members of the congressional intelligence committees a picture of the domestic threat so stale and incomplete that it didn't provide the necessary sense of urgency one month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., said Monday he has not yet been able to compare the two memos, but would be concerned if senior policy-makers and key lawmakers weren't aware they were missing some relevant information provided to the president.

"I think it is an important policy issue that we may not know everything the president knows, but we at least should know we don't know some things, that there is something being withheld," Graham said.

Members of Congress, outside experts and the independent commission investigating pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures are more broadly questioning whether useful intelligence was, and still is, being held too restrictively.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee, urged the release of all classified materials on bin Laden since 1998. He said the sharing of classified information is still being affected by "fundamental issues of trust" and turf battles.

"The system is dysfunctional. It is more than broken. It is more than the left hand doesn't, from time to time, communicate with the right hand," Wyden said Monday. "... Everybody feels that by sharing any information, that somehow this makes it hard for them to protect issues that are important to them."

Bush administration officials stress that regardless of what was put in the two memos, nothing given to the president or senior policy-makers foretold of the horrors that would unfold five weeks later during the suicide hijackings in New York and Washington that killed 3,000 people.

Access to both the presidential and senior executive intelligence briefings was greatly reduced across government during the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush administration because of concerns about repeated leaks.

Government watchdogs, however, question assertions by the Bush administration that the public release Saturday of the president's daily intelligence memo from August 2001 set a potentially dangerous precedent that could hamper future presidents' ability to get candid advice.

The private National Security Archive, which collects previously secret government documents, has published at least 10 declassified presidential daily briefings over the years.

Steven Aftergood, who oversees the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said former CIA Director Robert Gates also was allowed to publish information from at least two presidential briefing memos in his memoir.

"It shows the claim that this whole category of documents must remain secret is utterly hollow," Aftergood said. "There must be many more briefs that could be released like this one with absolutely no harm to security, and to the benefit of the public understanding."

"The Aug. 7, 2001 memo, known as the senior executive intelligence brief or SEIB, didn't mention the 70 FBI investigations into possible al-Qaida activity that Bush had been told of a day earlier in a memo entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," the officials said Monday."

Am I making sense?

Some members of Congress said Monday they were concerned that senior executive memos and other similar documents may have given policy-makers working for Bush an incomplete picture of the terror threat.

But administration officials said there was nothing sinister about the deletions because the memos are destined for two different audiences. The CIA historically uses different standards for the president's daily intelligence update and the one provided to senior policy-makers, officials said.

Typically, the senior executives' memo goes to scores of Cabinet-agency officials from the assistant secretary level up and doesn't include raw intelligence or sensitive information about ongoing law enforcement matters, officials said.

Yea, like the Assistant Secretary of Housing and HUD needs this information, the assistant secretaries of GAO, Transportation, Education and many in congress who are known leakers, such as leachey, kennnedy and kerry. This is another bogus trap by the demoncrapts and the sorry arsed media. They don't know of what they speak. Too stupid to investigate. I could go on about those at the cabinet level that have no need to know and they don't want to know, it has nothing to do with thier CABINET DEPARTMENTS. Those that have the need to know, were informed, except certain leaky leaches.

Maybe this is good news, they were harping on Condi about "tasking" agents to look into things and asked it in such a way that it seemed like they knew the answer. Maybe they thought there was no activity (cause thats what a leaker told them) and now they will have egg on their faces

Am I making sense?

You are BRILLANT!!!!!! I bet you are absolutely right. Ben Veniste was fed the Cabinet brief pre Condi's testimony that is why the 8-06-01 PDB has blown up in their face. I wondered why CNN and the Washington Post seemed to be totally divorced from reality in their reporting about the PDB. I bet the DNC Talking Points memo CNN/Washington Post/NY Times got told them all about the Cabinet brief so they didn't bother to even READ the PDB! HAAAA! There is a GOD! The proof is the cosmic justice of how every sleazy trick of the DNC ends up smacking them right between the eyes!

Why hasnt the media blasted Clarke for his lying about how senior admin officials averted the millenium plot? Condi was right on that one too, it was an alert border guard, not White House meetings that averted that disaster:

http://windsofchange.net/archives/004850.php

The Coho arrived in Port Angeles in the dark, just before 6 p.m., the last boat of the day. Customs inspector Diana Dean stopped each car as it rolled off, asking the drivers a few basic questions and wishing them a good trip.

The last car in line was a green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates.

"Where are you going?" "Sattal."

"Why are you going to Seattle?" "Visit."

"Where do you live?" "Montreal."

"Who are you going to see in Seattle?" "No, hotel."

The driver was fidgeting, jittery, sweating. His hands disappeared from sight as he began rummaging around the car's console. That made Dean nervous.

She handed him a customs declaration to fill out, a subtle way of stalling while she took a closer look. He filled out the form and handed it back. By this time, Dean observed, he was acting "hinky."

She asked him to turn the car off, pop open the trunk and step outside. Noris was slow to respond but complied.

At this point, the other customs inspectors were finished and waiting to go home. They came over to help process the last car of the day. Dean told them this might be a "load vehicle" ... code for one used for smuggling. Inspector Mark Johnson took over the interrogation.

"Habla español?" he asked.

"Parlez-vous français?" the man replied, handing over his ID. Not a passport or driver's license, but his Costco card.

"So you like to shop in bulk? You know, the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?" Johnson joked. He escorted Noris to a table, where he asked him to empty his pockets.

Inspector Mike Chapman searched the suitcase in the trunk. As he was doing that, inspector Danny Clem reached in and unscrewed the fastener on the spare-tire compartment. He opened the panel, looked inside and called out to Johnson.

Johnson, grabbing Noris by the shoulders, led him over to the trunk. At a hefty 240 pounds, Johnson had no trouble maneuvering the slim Noris. They peered in and saw no spare tire. In its place were several green bags that appeared to filled with white powder, as well as four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid. A drug dealer, perhaps?

Johnson felt Noris shudder. He escorted Noris back to the table and patted him down for weapons. Inside Noris' camel's-hair coat was a bulge. As Johnson was slipping off the coat to take a closer look, he was suddenly left holding an empty garment. Noris was fleeing.

By the time it sank in, Noris was nearly a block away. Johnson and Chapman took off on foot, yelling, "Stop! Police!"

With his head start, Noris escaped. The inspectors couldn't find him. Then Chapman noticed movement under a pickup parked in front of a shoe store. He squatted down, saw Noris, drew his gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up.

Noris stood up, arms raised, and looked at Chapman, just 20 feet away with his gun drawn. Then he turned and ran. "Stop! Police!"

Johnson joined Chapman on Noris' tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver's door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him.

They took him back to the terminal and handed him over to the Port Angeles police, who put him in the back seat of a patrol car.

Johnson took a sample of the white powder from the trunk to test. Was it heroin, speed, cocaine? Negative on each. As he shook the jars of brown liquid, Noris, who could see Johnson from the patrol car, ducked down to the floor.
Within a couple of days, the inspectors would learn that the brown liquid Johnson had shaken was a powerful, highly unstable relative of nitroglycerin that could have blown them all to bits.

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